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Saturday, June 18, 2016

Pre Pub Book Buzz: Ninth City Burning by J. Patrick Black

This September marks the release of the first installment of what sounds like an amazing new series! J. Patrick Black'sNinth City Burning is already drawing crazy attention, including a recent feature on EW.com and a blurb from Patricia Briggs. It's also being touted as a great new read for fans of Red Rising and Ender's Game. That's some pretty big claims, as I'm sure you know, but I think maybe this one might be able to live up to the expectation.

Here's a bit about the book courtesy of the publisher:

Centuries of war with aliens threaten the future of human civilization on earth in this gripping, epic science fiction debut...

We never saw them coming.

Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but dust and rubble. When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It seemed nothing could stop it—until we discovered we could wield the power too.

Five hundred years later, the Earth is locked in a grinding war of attrition. The talented few capable of bending thelemity to their will are trained in elite military academies, destined for the front lines. Those who refused to support the war have been exiled to the wilds of a ruined Earth.

But the enemy's tactics are changing, and Earth's defenders are about to discover this centuries-old war has only just begun. As a terrible new onslaught looms, heroes will rise from unlikely quarters, and fight back.

What do you think? I think it's going on my "must have" list immediately!

Now, I do have one more little taste of Ninth City Burning to share with you today - an excerpt from the publisher to whet your appetite:

The Valentine War, Earth 500 Years Ago

It starts with the world how it used to be, with countries and billions of people living everywhere. Back then there was no such thing as thelemity, and people built houses and machines sort of like they have in settlements today, but all of that changed when the Valentines came.

The reason we call them the Valentines is that the day they first attacked, February 14 on the old Western Calendar, was called “Valentine’s Day”. We still don’t know what the Valentines call themselves, because we’ve never been able to talk to them. We don’t even know what they look like. People had all sorts of different names for them early in the war, but “Valentine” is the one that ended up being the most popular. It used to mean something totally different, but not many people remember that now.

We never saw them coming. All at once cities just started disappearing. A city would be there, everything totally normal, and then it would be gone, nothing but rubble and a cloud of dust. By the time we figured out we were under attack, half the cities in the world had already been destroyed. We tried to fight back, but the Valentines had thelemity, and our strongest weapons were next to useless. They probably would have killed every single person on the planet, except for one thing: It turned out we could use thelemity too.

Ninth City Burning hits shelves September 6, courtesy of Ace, and is now available for preorder everywhere.